March 28, 2024

It runs in the family

Editor's note: This is the first in a two-part series about five Creston attorney families with daughters who have become second- and third-generation lawyers.

By IAN RICHARDSON

CNA staff reporter
irichardson@crestonnews.com

Private attorney and former magistrate Marion James sums it up in two words: “Father’s pride.”

It’s the feeling he had when his daughter, Amanda, began to help him research cases. It’s the feeling he had when she was sworn in by the Iowa State Bar Association. And it’s the feeling he had describing how she grew up to take her current position as an assistant attorney at the Sullivan & Ward Professional Corporation.

Marion James is among five proud lawyers in the Creston area who have seen one of their daughters go into the field of law. Along with the Jameses, the other attorney-daughter families are Stephanie Miller, daughter of Ann and the late Stuart Nielsen; Angela Davis, daughter of Skip Kenyon; Elizabeth Lee, daughter of Tim Kenyon; and Loretta Harvey, daughter of Ed Harvey.

How did so many attorneys’ children come to love law like their parents? For each one, it was a different, at times winding, road.

Stephanie Miller, now an assistant county attorney in Kossuth County, grew up in Corning with not just one, but two lawyers as parents. Being an attorney’s daughter meant a lot of time hanging out in the office — sometimes being put to work filing papers. It was during those years that the Nielsen love of law began to sink in.

“When she was a baby, she used to walk around with a little suitcase in her hand,” Ann Nielsen said. “She would pull out blank income tax forms, and we had a little table in the living room, and she would be doing taxes.”

Miller would attend Drake University Law School immediately after her undergraduate studies. She said she knew law was what she wanted to do, but she felt no pressure to follow in her parents’ footsteps.

“There was pressure to not come back home after you’d graduated from undergrad,” she said, “but there was no pressure to be a lawyer.”

Ann Nielsen agreed.

“Did she need to go to college? Yes. Did she need to graduate from college? Yes. But she didn’t necessarily have to be a lawyer,” she said.

Angela Davis, now a government relations attorney with Wasker, Dorr, Wimmer & Marcouiller in West Des Moines, had, like Miller, helped her father with clerical office tasks as a child. Born into a family full of lawyers — her father, grandfather and two uncles all practiced — she said she listened to plenty of shop-talk when the Kenyon family got together.

“I thought it was pretty normal for people to be talking about criminal law scenarios or probate issues,” she said.

Skip Kenyon and his wife, Mary Ann, had a similar perspective to the Nielsens when raising Davis.

“We never told any of the kids where we thought they had to go,” Skip Kenyon said. “We always let them choose their own paths.”

But unlike Miller, Davis said law was initially one of the last things she wanted to pursue. Davis attended the University of Iowa and studied English with an emphasis in creative writing. She would end up in Raleigh, N.C., as a choreographer and creator of her own production company, the result of her love of art and background in dance.

However, after some reconsideration about going back to school, Davis realized she was interested in pursuing a career in law. She came back to Iowa and began studying at Drake University.

Although she was the daughter of a proud University of Iowa Law School graduate, Davis would choose Drake because, as a single parent going back to school, she felt it would better fit her scheduling needs.

“That was an interesting conversation,” she said. “My uncle Greg went to Drake law school, and my dad (Skip) and my uncle Tim went to Iowa law school. So, they had, I think, a silent bet going how it was going to turn out.”

Davis would graduate in 2010.

Like Davis, Amanda James also had not made her decision right away.

“It’s not one of those things like in fifth grade I said, ‘Oh, I’m going to put on a suit and carry a briefcase when I get older just like my Dad,’” James said. “It was more gradual, like an idea that’s always there in the back of your mind, but because it’s always there it’s kind of like my curiosity — I want to know what all the options are.”

For her undergraduate studies, James majored in international relations, then began to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in painting. At that point, however, she realized she wasn’t being challenged in the way she wanted to be. She soon decided that law would be the career that would “check all the boxes” for her.

“There was intellectual stimulation. I was making a difference. I enjoyed the people that were in that field,” James said. “Those boxes weren’t all checked in the other areas that I researched.”

Like Davis, James attended Drake University, which was where her father had studied. She graduated in 2008.

Elizabeth Lee, daughter of county attorney Tim Kenyon, was open to other careers when she first began attending the University of Iowa as an undeclared major. However, she soon found that law fit her interests when she took a class that discussed law and civil rights issues.

“You kind of have a moment where you’re looking at this and doing extra homework when you’re like, ‘Okay, this is what I’m meant to be doing, this is going to be my focus area,’” she said.

When Lee told her parents she wanted to go into law, she said they were very supportive, even though they had never told her that was something that she should go into. Her father joked with her about it a bit, as well.

“He kind of laughed and said, ‘I guess you have the disease too. It’s genetic at this point,’” she said.

Lee would, like her father and grandfather, attend law school at Iowa, making herself a third-generation Iowa Law School graduate.

Loretta Harvey would be the only daughter not to attend law school in Iowa. She graduated from Creighton Unviersity in Omaha, Neb., in 2002.

While these daughters chose to go into law, several of their siblings took other routes, including all of their male siblings. Sometimes, like in the Nielsen family, where Miller’s sister is the only one who did not chose law, it’s a bit of a family joke.

“(Miller’s) older sister is an actuary and calls herself the ‘white sheep’ of the family,” Ann Nielsen said.

All of the daughters, at different times and ages, had chosen to pursue the practice of law. The next part of the story would come when many of them returned home to work alongside their families.